The British author Patrick Gale opens his 16th novel with the kind of ironic episode fiction often employs to reinforce a theme: Several less-than-benign asylum attendants undress Gale’s protagonist, Harry Cane, restrain him in a hot bath and declare, “This is to calm you.” In fact, ­Harry has already lived his life calmly. To be other than calm — to assert one’s self, to demand something — requires a courage he doesn’t seem to possess. An Edwardian gentleman “schooled in conformity,” Harry strolls about London, lunches at his club and takes tea. Often he steams, without restraint, in the local Turkish baths. He has no job, no real diversions. When he swims, he’s “a paddler, not a plunger.” Yet what concerns Gale is the storm that hides beneath the calm, even from Harry. (Say “Harry Cane” fast enough and you get “hurricane.”) An all but accidental gay interlude exposes Harry’s “clothed life for a sham.” His quietude is, it appears, born of longing, a “buried essence” shadowed by the threat of imprisonment and, at the least, social spurning.

Even as “A Place Called Winter” merges certain aspects of the mystery, romance and western genres, it also aims to survey the vulnerability and alienation intrinsic to humanity and its lacquered societies. Harry wouldn’t have called himself gay — he has a wife, a daughter, an all-star ­brother who “faced the world openly” — but once his family deems him an “unmentionable,” he ships off for Canada’s prairie provinces, where a man looking to abrade scandal can get 160 acres if he fences it, farms it and subsists on it for three years. Self-knowledge, Gale suggests, is built from the ground up.

If the fence Harry erects on his acquired land is a metaphor for his ingrained isolation, his new neighbors — a dungaree-­donning pioneer woman whose experience of sexual assault effects a psychological quarantine; her brother, whose world, like Harry’s, has been enclosed by disgrace; and an entire tribe of ­dislocated Cree Indians — are equally circumscribed. Even Gale’s broad-brush villain is corralled by limp-hearted insecurity. Demarcation has been drawn between love and hate, illness and health, wildness and domestication, desire and revulsion.

Gale’s generally nimble language is alternately as breezy as an E.M. Forster drawing room and as unyielding as the pre-climate-change Canadian north. Yet in the wider spaces of “A Place Called Winter,” Gale plants unmusical patches of exposition — how to install plumbing in a frontier home, for instance — that point to commendable research but don’t make for great fiction. Occasionally enervated phrases stumble in: Harry’s affair ­reaches “the button-breaking heights of passion”; on the prairie, his old life “sounded like the stuff of fiction.” In truth, Harry doesn’t rouse much sympathy. He readily and repeatedly accepts his fate; he forgives instantaneously. His supposedly redemptive tale, which clumsily ends with a fence gate installed and fastened open, is an exercise in assailing a god, not living as a human.

Gale has spoken of the real-life Harry Cane, his grandmother’s father, whom the family inexplicably banished to Canada early in the last century. “I gayed my great-grandfather,” he has said, because no records could gainsay the claim.

For all but a few of us, faulty memory and shabby archives will, sooner rather than later, rub out our small lives. Those that endure often do so in garbled fashion. Write our stories while we can, Gale seems to be suggesting, before the prairie winds sweep them away.